The Billionaire Janitor Is Back! novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: The Founders' Table
On the fifteenth of November, sixty people sat down at the long table in the main hall, and I wore the green dress.
Candles ran down the white cloth in two rows.
Augusta Lindenmere watched from her portrait over the fireplace, in black bombazine, with the look of a woman who had seen worse dinners.
Mal sat on my right in the suit Tania had brought.
It was charcoal wool, cut so well that I had stared when he came out of the bathroom.
I had said something unprintable, and we had been ten minutes late.
He had shaved his head that morning.
He kept looking at the candles.
"You all right?" I said, low.
"I'm going to tell the room myself, after the pudding."
"You don't have to."
"I want to. Before he does."
I put my hand over his on the cloth.
At the head of the table sat the oldest of the founding families.
She was a woman in her eighties with a pearl choker and a silver cane hooked on her chair.
She had been looking at Mal since the soup.
Wendell rose before the plates were cleared.
He tapped a glass with his fork and smiled down the table, warm as a Sunday.
"Friends," he said. "Founders. Thank you for coming. Every November we celebrate the continuity of this school, and nothing speaks of continuity like a settled household."
He lifted his glass toward us.
"To Edie, and to her new husband."
Glasses rose along the table, politely, and I lifted mine and felt my face stiffen into a smile.
"I admit I was curious about him," Wendell said, still smiling. "As a board chair, I'd hate for our Head to marry a stranger. So I asked a gentleman in Millbrook to look into it."
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